Fiction: Lee Annis is the ultimate Material Girl. At 28 she is a rock star, famous enough to be recognised in the street and rich enough to do, buy and snort just about everything she wants. Problem is, Lee doesn't want anything except Billy, her co-star in the band - and he's the one thing she can't have, since he has decided to pull the plug on the whole gig and get married to a nice girl called Sylvia.
That's how How It Ends starts. And in terms of plot, that's more or less it; for the rest of the book Lee drifts around the edges of a world defined by airports and hotels and punctuated by analgesics, alcohol and designer clothes. Los Angeles, Tokyo, Rome and Berlin flash by, recognisable but meaningless. Men, too. It would be an interesting exercise to count just how many of them Lee beds as she stumbles from one hangover to the next - there must be almost as many sexual encounters in this book as there are pages.
Lee's relentless negativity makes her hard to like, but provides some sharply-observed snapshots of life as a minor celebrity. As seen through Lee's eyes, fame is a singularly unappealing round of "TV and radio shows, book blurbs, police reports, press releases, album sleeves, inflated low-grade memoirists, wholly devoted websites, bug-eyed stalkers, anonymous lechers and letters, lubricious late-night phone calls . . ." And so on, and on - and on.
The trouble with all this is, it's just not terribly interesting. Sure, it's enigmatic. Sure, there are some mildly amusing descriptions of the inept coital fumblings of the male of the species. The story even threatens to come to life for a while - ironically, after the mysterious death of one of Lee's lovers, a chap called Scott Weaver - but this potential plotline soon tails off, blurs into the murky apathy that is Lee's existence. "No one understands me, knows me, gets me," she wails towards the end of the book.
Well, I tried - honestly I did. But frankly, Beckett did this sort of thing a century ago, and in one sentence.
And speaking of sentences, anyone who can come out - even occasionally - with a sentence such as "I turn away, riven and tormented by the lack of scheme, of code, or warning, the absence of external threat, my exclusion from belonging" deserves to be chopped up and fed to small, greedy animals.
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist
How It Ends. By Dan Collins, Jonathan Cape 249pp, £10
Arminta Wallace